Gale_TP#16

Gale Workman

TP#16

Sept. 25, 2014, 8 a.m.

Hecht House

Sore is oh-so foundational and Jihan is level three. During the past three weeks I have observed their strengths and weaknesses. Sore reads and writes significantly better than she speaks, and listening is her weakest skill. Jihan is a strong listener and reader; he's a good speaker. Jihan learned English grammar in Korea from a Korean-speaking teacher. He's working hard to understand English grammar now.

Today, we used letter tiles from my BananaGrams game to build vocabulary of high-frequency (mostly two-letter words). I taught grammar along the way -- prepositions and conjunctions -- even verb mood.

I asked each student to get paper and pen to compile a vocabulary list of new words as we played. We reviewed their lists to conclude our session.

The l44 letter tiles were face-up in the center of the round table. I asked Sore and Jihan to select titles to line up the alphabet across the table. We discussed how the Spanish and Korean alphabets are different.

Next, the students extracted the vowels from the alphabet, and I determined they understood the terms vowel and consonant.

I pulled out the "E" tile -- the most frequently used vowel -- and asked the students to place one consonant in front of the E to make an English word. Jihun moved the B tile to make BE. Perfect! I asked each student to speak a sentence using the word BE. I praised, and I corrected errors. We continued the game using each vowel.

When the word IF was played, Jihan spoke a sentence correctly using the subjunctive mood: if I were. I praised him and explained his correct use of subjunctive. He put the term on his vocab list because, he said, he struggled with IF, and knowing what grammar to study will help him.

When Sore played the word ON, I demonstrated prepositions as showing relationship between nouns: Gale sits on the chair, and I sought feedback from the students that they could use other prepositions correctly.

To the word AN, Sore added the letter D, and we had an opportunity to discuss conjunctions. Jihan was interested in FANBOYS ... took notes and asked questions. Sore wrote the term conjunction on her vocab list.

Our final round was building the longest word we could from AN. It was EXPAND, built by Jihan and used as EXPANDED in his sentence. Sore caught that difference, so it allowed for a quick lesson on adding ED to make a verb past tense.